Flat Earth News by Nick Davies

If you are a carpenter, Nick Davies points out, you had better be accurate. And if you're a diplomat, you should be loyal, even if you do tell lies now and again. But journalists, above all, should be dedicated to telling the truth. And they are, in lots of cases, not, says Davies. Here, he tells us how we have entered an era in which you can't believe everything you read.

For instance, why do some obviously false stories get into the system and are printed all over the world? Because people don't check their facts, that's why. Why does government propaganda find its way, unchallenged, into some newspapers? Because governments do a good job of planting stories.

Here, Davies covers an immense amount of ground, from the nonevent of the Millenium Bug to the way the Iraq invasion was reported in 2003 — as a read, it's bracing, it's moreish, and you'll tear through it.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

'Finally I was forced to admit that I work in a corrupted profession.' When award-winning journalist Nick Davies decided to break Fleet Street's unwritten rule by investigating his own colleagues, he found that the business of reporting the truth had been slowly subverted by the mass production of ignorance. Working with a network of off-the-record sources, Davies uncovered the story of the prestigious "Sunday" newspaper which allowed the CIA and MI6 to plant fiction in its columns; the newsroom which routinely rejects stories about black people; the respected paper that hired a professional fraudster to set up a front company to entrap senior political figures; the newspapers which support law and order while paying cash bribes to bent detectives.Davies names names and exposes the national stories which turn out to be pseudo events manufactured by the PR industry, and the global news stories which prove to be fiction generated by a new machinery of international propaganda. He shows the impact of this on a world where consumers believe a mass of stories which, in truth, are as false as the idea that the Earth is flat - from the millennium bug to the WMD in Iraq - tainting government policy, perverting popular belief. He presents a new model for understanding news. With the help of researchers from Cardiff University, who ran a ground-breaking analysis of our daily news, Davies found most reporters, most of the time, are not allowed to dig up stories or check their facts - a profession corrupted at the core. Read all about it. The news will never look the same again.